Paean to Hidalgo de Parral

I wouldn’t have missed Copper Canyon, with its clean pine air and its staggering gorges and vistas, but as I said earlier it was probably a tactical mistake to go there.  It’s so remote that to get out again was a Herculean task: from Creel to Mazatlan required three days of driving in a vast loop that took me East, South, and West again, with nights spent in Hidalgo de Parral and Durango.

Hidalgo de Parral.  If not for this tactical mistake I never would have known ye...

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It was a long sweaty drive from Creel and I was still suffering the effects of traveller’s tummy from the unbottled arancita I’d drunk in Batopilas, and the approach to Parral tangled me in crazy narrow streets that Miss Google couldn’t untangle (“Turn Left.  Rerouting...  Turn right, then left.  Rerouting... In 300 feet turn right—ah, fuck it, you’re on your own”),

detoured by road construction barriers up one-car-width alleys through crumbling plaster slums where a woman screamed at me as a truck backing out of a hidden driveway just missed me, turning randomly right and left on streets like slanted stone corridors with all eyes on the lost gringo in his yellow car, until finally a policeman waved me over and babbled at me in Spanish; I started by apologizing for driving on the presumed one-way street which he didn’t understand and then when I mentioned the name of my hotel actually led me there by WALKING in front of Pepin’s yellow hood, three blocks through chaotic unlaned traffic with one hand motioning me on and the other deflecting the trucks and motorbikes swerving around us, to deposit me under the little yellow sign for my hotel—muchas gracias and no de nada accepted...

And I went out walking looking for the Museum of Pancho Villa (this is where he was assassinated), leaving my hotel into the slum district out my window with some fear and found Hidalgo de Parral to

be the most photogenic city I’d ever seen, an industrially-compacted mashup of crumbling slums fingerlaced together with gleaming high-fashion shopping districts and almost Parisian stonework; Venice-tiny streets with single-pedestrian sidewalks tumbled downhill framed in stained, cracked, or literally demolished candy-colored hovels to open onto wide plazas with silver-lettered department-store facades with mannequins in the picture windows and a magnificent orange stone cathedral in the evening light; glamorously dressed women walked by trailing perfume past grease-stained men in rags trying to start their wrecked Chevy sedan with its belts screaming

and a policeman bending bemusedly over the open hood as traffic backed up behind it; here was a romantic arched stone bridge over a “river” that was a dry and paved bed with a car driving on it; there was a high green hill behind town with a statue on it; and come on but some of the architecture was simply absurd—a Gothic Southern mansion framed in cedar trees alongside a faded Coca Cola billboard, a baldly orange hotel in modular ovals like a relic of Communist Bulgaria, an entire skyscraper of green glass given over to storage with the windows on every floor piled high with junk; every fourth intersection closed and dug up for construction (glad I’d walked); wide hilltop plazas with vistas over abandoned industrial office buildings; lost alleyways past paint-peeling garages leading to fantasy stone footbridges over the green gorge...

Thank God for Google Maps marking my hotel but it was still a wander to get back, starting to recognize the tiny intersections now by for example the “New York” bar with its giant neon statue-of-liberty sign and I never did find the Museum of Pancho Villa; on its website it said it was closed Lunes anyway (is today Monday?  Damn) and I got a sound sleep in the sweet-soft bed in the upstairs

hotel room with the cracked toilet and the next day left for Durango—Hidalgo de Parral—a transitional night en route to somewhere else, a hotel room left behind, and oddly a place I could see living in...